This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll Read Free Page A

another two-to-three hours to lay it down. Some songs are just plain elusive. I fiddle with them for years and they never come out quite right. I don’t know why I bother. It’s a bit like doing the crossword puzzle, I suppose. I have to complete it however long it takes. I just wish that I could achieve the perfect song at the end of it all but they always work out a bit mangled.
    I am not the world’s greatest instrumentalist and my voice isn’t Caruso, but I pride myself on my tunes and even more on my lyrics. I am probably more of a story-teller than strictly a musician. I love stories, and I love to tell stories in my songs - vignettes, slices of life. Something like this:
     
    There’s bandit neon flashing by the fag machine as a barmaid sneers at leering lads who’ve had her … in their dreams.
    There’s a bulldog with a pool cue on a picture on the wall.
    And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.
     
    Some walking tattoo stamps on my shoe then says: “Sorry mate”
    You know the sort who’d need rohypnol just to get a date.
    And I’m staring at my mobile wishing telesales would call.
    And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.
     
    Let’s get metaphysical and question why we’re here.
    Cos it cannot be the company and I wouldn’t chance the beer.
    You know this fog of smoke is second hand, but it’s fresher than the jokes.
    It’s just like someone grabbed hold of my past and rammed it in my spokes.
     
    The thump-thump jukebox pumping out that idle pop.
    And just like anyone with any sense I’m wishing it would stop.
    It’s another faceless one-hit-wonder’s name I can’t recall,
    Let’s take a baseball bat to Simon Cowell now once and for all,
    Because his so-called bloody music’s got me crawling up the wall,
    And I wonder what I’m doing here at all.
    Do I have hate? Yeah, I have hate and it isn’t buried very deep neither. I don’t really know why. My parents are great, the usual arguments and jockeying for power and individuality but that’s all. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me, no life-scarring tragedies, no being kissed by Steve Crum as a baby. But it just strikes me that I am surrounded by injustice from the derivative, manipulative crap that makes it to platinum to the brutal lives some folks have to lead because some bastard is exploiting them. So, I carry my soap box around with me and I rant at will. Cathy’s parents never got that. Ranting is what lunatics and working class people do, there only being a mere hair’s breadth between them. You wouldn’t think that Cathy’s dad’s family was digging turnips in Holderness only a couple of generations back or that Cathy’s mum was a factory worker down at Hawker Siddeley’s. Tossers. Yeah, that’s the sort of thing that gets me - class traitors and they’ve got fuck-all class if you ask me.
    People criticise me for being the Billy Bragg of the East Riding. I take it as a compliment. At least Billy writes about something, and I try to too. Why would anybody want to write about nothing just to get the cash till jingling? How empty is that? Besides, who wants to be rich? What do you do with it? You’ve got the press at you all the time hoping that you get cancer or book into The Priory or get caught shagging Madonna in Birmingham New Street or something. Everything is a hoo-ha. Your kids need bodyguards and you need a PR agent. You sit in your fifty room mansion discussing the servant problem and whether ‘peak oil’ is a myth or not, and Lady Jake Pembleton thinks that her party is ruined because her blancmange wobbled too much or her soufflé flopped. Yeah, right, I would rather be in a bedsit down Victoria Ave with a real life and a smashing sexy girl who nearly gives me a heart attack every time she steps out of the shower.
    Actually, Jade nearly gives me a heart attack quite a lot one way or another. Her attitude to life powering straight off the National Grid is the first reason. Her utter devotion to me to the